Youth unemployment is scarring a whole cohort of young people.

My name is Ava Patel, I’m 23 and I have a degree in Journalism from Nottingham Trent University. After I graduated I spent over a year looking for jobs and I finally got one manning the phones in a call centre. I’ve not just been rejected for journalism jobs but for manual work too, including shelf-stacking at a well-known supermarket, despite being qualified and making all the effort to get the job. The most common reply I’d get to an email or an application form I’d spent about 45 minutes completing was “Due to the high number of applications your application has not been successful on this occasion. We cannot provide any feedback.” I read the same message so many times that when I finally got the call centre job, I was over the moon. I’d often get advisors at the Job Centre whilst I was claiming Job Seekers Allowance asking me why I was even there, to which I’d simply reply, “can’t get a job.”

Countless rejections without feedback started to chip away at my confidence but when I found out other graduates were struggling to find employment too, I realised it was less to do with me and more to do with the fact that there simply aren’t enough jobs for young people. We are becoming the lost generation, there are over a million of us searching for work. We do have qualifications, work experience and drive, but we do not have the jobs to apply them to.

I finally got a position to work to raise awareness of youth unemployment as part of this year’s Channel 4’s Battlefront Campaign to tackle youth unemployment[3]. I’ve had the opportunity to attend the Lib Dem Conference and the recent Channel 4 News Class of 2012 event hosted by Jon Snow, with contributions across the political spectrum, from MPs Damian Collins, Stella Creasy, David Milliband and Sainsbury’s CEO Justin King. While the debate was heated and passionate, not enough solutions were put forward. The Youth Contract only goes so far and all the goodwill behind work experience, training and apprenticeships schemes does not lead to job creation. We can have all the work experience in the world, but it won’t help us if there isn’t a paid, full time job at the end of it. We as young people need long term job creation, not more initiatives that provide short term solutions.

When I got the job to be a Battlefront campaigner it felt like my hard work and persistence had paid off. It almost felt surreal to think someone out there wanted to employ me, wanted to see all I had to offer. Part of Channel 4’s education output, this year Battlefront is focussing on the single most important issue facing young people today – the fact that over one million 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK today, according to the Office of National Statistics, are without a job. Youth unemployment is no longer a problem, but a disaster. And this is exactly what I said in the interview process. Along with three other campaigners we’re raising awareness of the issue on camera and online and my aim is to get young peoples’ voices heard. For too long employers and politicians have been calling young people job shy and lazy but for the vast majority of us this simply isn’t true. My ultimate aim is to speak to politicians about how they can provide solutions to make the labour market more accessible to young people. The current government’s answers to youth unemployment via the Work Programme and Youth Contract do not guarantee jobs and do not offer a sustainable long term solution. We lose £5bn per year in taxes and the economy loses £10bn per year in economic output because young people aren’t working[4] [pdf], a crisis our country cannot afford, especially in the current economic climate.

In the past year alone youth unemployment has risen by 41 per cent[5] (pdf) and it rose again this month[6]. Young people like me, my friends and other Battlefront campaigners are suffering scarring effects of long-term unemployment and planning ahead for a life where we will never earn as much as previous generations. It’s no longer enough to give token gestures as we slowly lose our self-esteem, that’s not the tag line we want for the class of 2012.